“Because that’s what my people felt. Every day. For three hundred years.” I lean forward. “The same stares. The same smiles that promised violence. The knowledge that death was one wrong move away, one master’s bad mood, one decision of a lord who wanted to hunt.”
“I know.” She’s crying openly now. “I know. I understand.”
“You don’t understandanything.” I’m on my feet before I decide to move. She scrambles backward, falling onto her ass, but the sleeping platform is behind her, blocking retreat. “You hadonehour of being looked at and you’re shaking so hard you can barely speak. You got to walk back here knowing it would end, and that you’d be safely out of sight again. You walked through the camp andno onetouched you.”
I’m standing over her now, and she has to crane her neck to look up at me, tears streaming down her face.
“They didn’t get walls. They didn’t get an end point, Alleria. They woke up to it every morning and fell asleep to it every night.”
“I know.” The words are barely audible. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“I don’t know what else to do.” Her voice breaks completely. “What do you want me to do? I can’t undo any of it. I can’t?—”
“Aren’t you listening to me? You can’t doanything.” I crouch in front of her. “There’s nothing to do. Nothing to say. No way to make amends. I wanted you to see what it was like. Now you know. That’s all there is.”
She’s shaking so hard, her teeth are chattering between sobs. Her whole body has curled in on itself, trying to make herself smaller, trying to disappear. The connection is screaming withher fear, her shame, her desperate wish to be anywhere but here.
And through it all—the terror and the tears—I feel myself lean toward her.
I hate that. I hate that some part of me wants to ease this, wants to say something that isn’t designed to hurt. Three hundred years of being owned and used and I still haven’t burned out the part of me that responds to suffering with anything other than satisfaction.
“Look at me.”
She doesn’t. Her face is buried in her hands, shoulders heaving with the force of her sobs. I catch her wrists and pull them down, forcing her to meet my eyes. Her face is wrecked—red, swollen, blotchy with tears. She looks broken. She looks exactly the way I want her to look.
It doesn’t feel the way I want it to.
“This is what you are now.” I keep my voice low. “Not a princess, or a hunter.Prey. You live because I allow it. You breathe because I haven’t decided to stop you.”
Her lips part. For a moment I think she’s going to apologize again, and I’ll have to?—
“Is that why you do it?”
I go still.
“The kneeling. The collar. Calling me pet.” Her voice is shaking so much I have to concentrate to make out the words, but she holds my gaze. “Is that why? So I understand?”
“Partly.”
“What’s the other part?”
The question hangs between us. I’m still holding her wrist, her pulse hammering against my fingers, fast as a rabbit’s.
“Because I can. Because you’re here, and you’re mine, and no one is going to stop me.”
She takes in a shaky breath. Holds it, and then lets it out.
“Is that what they said? The ones who did it to you?”
The words are like a blade slipping between my ribs.
I stop breathing.
She’s wrong. I’mnothinglike them. I’m repaying a debt. Balancing a scale. Making her understand …
Except I remember the first time a noblewoman made me kneel beside her chair. The satisfaction in her eyes. The smile when I obeyed.
